The World's Economic Centre of Gravity 1980-2050. Produced by Danny Quah, 2011

Google Scholar Citations reports that Quah's most-cited works include his 1989 paper[2] on Vector Autoregressions with Olivier Blanchard and his papers on poverty traps in cross-country economic growth[3] and the convergence of Twin Peaked income distributions.[4] His published academic writings range widely from his prize-winning[5] 2011 paper on the shifting global economy - mapping the eastwards movement in the world's economic center of gravity away from its 1980s mid-Atlantic location[6] - to work while still a graduate student on the appendix to the famous Monetarist paper "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic" (by Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace).[7] Quah calls The Great Shift East the move in the world's economic center of gravity out of the mid-Atlantic location where it had been for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, pulled by the rise of economies in the east. Between 1980 and 2010 that economic center of gravity moved 5,000 km east, to the Persian Gulf, on a trajectory that continues to take it towards the boundary between India and China.[8]

Although the early part of his career saw close attention to technical developments in timeseries econometrics, Quah became heavily influenced by the approach to communicating ideas exemplified in the work of Edward Tufte,[9] and sought similar dissemination of his research to a wider audience.